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Overview

The “untextbook” that teaches students to think like a sociologist.You May Ask Yourself gives instructors an alternative to the typical textbook by emphasizing the big ideas of the discipline and encouraging students to ask meaningful questions. This “non-textbook” strategy explains complex concepts through personal examples and storytelling, integrates coverage of social inequality throughout the textbook, and offers the largest collection of instructor resources for a book in its price range.

Editorial Reviews

social work major LaToya

“For once, I was actually excited about reading a textbook. It seemed as if the author was talking directly to me at times.”

nursing major Abigail

“It was like reading magazines with images of my favorite actors and politicians. I loved looking at the book and reading it.”

sociology major Melissa

“Honestly, I loved this book. It was so much more interesting than the other assigned readings, and reading You May Ask Yourself was the only assignment I always had done.”

Joan E. Manley

“I admit I assigned You May Ask Yourself mostly because of the cost to my students. However, after teaching from it, I find it is better than any text I have ever used. The chapters are interesting and thorough. In fact, I believe the chapters on gender and race are the best I have ever used. Dalton Conley also does a great job of integrating race and gender into every chapter. He covers a great deal of material, reflects important and recent research, and presents it in ways that students can understand.”

Cheryl Maes

“Your students will be captured by Conley’s conversational style and drawn into reading the text before they know what hit them. Conley provides a thorough discussion of theory with relevant past and contemporary examples. Further, he challenges the students to question what they’ve taken for granted most of their lives.”

Michael Nofz

“Rather than bombarding students with lots of statistics, Dalton Conley seems more concerned with getting the ‘big ideas’ of the discipline across, and to encourage them to ask meaningful questions.”

Sharon Warner Methvin

“Conley's text has filled an important niche for the community college needs. It is affordable, readable, colorful, and yet has fewer pages to read, which is an important consideration for my beginning-level community college students, and has examples that my young students can relate to.”

Jennifer Schultz

“Hip, splashy, youthful, concise, emotive, provocative, unpretentious, sharp, with a fresh take on the issues.”

Ralph Pyle

“You May Ask Yourself represents a departure from the typical cookie-cutter approach that characterizes most introductory texts. The best sociology textbooks read like storybooks, and students are actually interested in doing the readings. This book has the potential for approaching that standard.”

Brian Powell

“Dalton Conley's You May Ask Yourself is a refreshingly different non-textbook book that I'd strongly encourage others to explore.”

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Meet the Author

Dalton Conley is University Professor at New York University. He holds faculty appointments in NYU's Sociology Department, School of Medicine, and the Wagner School of Public Service. In 2005, Conley became the first sociologist to win the prestigious National Science Foundation's Alan T. Waterman Award, which honors an outstanding young U.S. scientist or engineer. He writes for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, Slate, and Forbes. He is the author of Honky (2001) and The Pecking Order: A Bold New Look at How Family and Society Determine Who We Become (2004). His other books include Being Black, Living in the Red: Race, Wealth, and Social Policy in America (1999), The Starting Gate: Birth Weight and Life Chances (2003), and Elsewhere, U.S.A. (2009). You can follow Dalton Conley on Twitter at @daltonconley.

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Customer Reviews

Anonymous

Posted October 30, 2014

I think this is an extremely good and helpful book. The graphics

I think this is an extremely good and helpful book. The graphics are fun, the book in itself is clear and uses easy language (my native language is finnish and I have had to google only one word in the first 45-pages...), gives an clear understanding how sociology has evolved in U.S. and how is it done today, the extra material (in W. W. Nortons StudySpace) is really clear and helpful (chapter outlines of every single chapter, quizzes, animations...). I warmly recommend this to everyone.(I am 21-years old and I do not speak English as my native language. I have had to read a lot worse textbooks than this. The only thing you have to do in order to understand this book is to understand why he says the things that he does. As the author says in the beginning of the book [page xxii] &quot;...each chapter is organized around a motivating paradox, meant to serve as the first chilling line that motivates the reader to read on to find out (or rather, figure out, because this book is not about spoon-feeding facts) the nugget, the debate, the fundamentally new way of looking of looking at the world that illuminates the paradox.&quot; If you are not ready to actually read this book the way it is meant to be read i.e. to think it through, it would be the same as a toddler flipping through an ABC-book, looking the pictures and then having a tantrum because the book didn't teach him to read.)

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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Anonymous

Posted August 30, 2012

It sucked

It sucked

0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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Anonymous

Posted January 20, 2012

Worst book I have EVER had to read!!!

I am a thirty year old student and have had to read many many textbooks that were not so good. This book is the worst text i have EFVER have to read. It does not flow well and there is a lot of word that are just not appropriate for the entry level sociology class that I am taking. Would not recommend it to anyone....

0 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

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